1. Field
Embodiments of the invention relate to a technique for integrating performance, sizing, and provisioning techniques with a business process.
2. Description of the Related Art
Momentum is growing for enterprises (i.e., organizations that use computers) to move to an on demand operating environment (i.e., become on demand businesses). An on demand business may be described as being flexible and reacting quickly to changing business conditions. Many enterprises see the on demand operating environment as the answer to the challenges of low resource utilization, high system management costs, long times to deploy new business functions, and nonintegrated business processes.
A major focus for an on demand business is achieving the flexibility needed to react quickly and adapt to changing conditions. Businesses that achieve this flexibility expect to have an edge over competitors who do not have such flexibility.
A large business typically has multiple departments. In any such large business, no matter how efficient any one department is, the way that the department communicates decisions to other departments is often inefficient, sometimes to the detriment of business results. Mature businesses are realizing they can no longer remain competitive if they tolerate such inefficiencies.
For example, a large business may have one department (e.g., a business department) that makes the business decisions and another department (e.g., an IT department) that is tasked with running a data center. Supporting the impact of business decisions on data center resources in a timely manner requires a consistent and efficient interaction between the two departments. Communication between these two departments is often ad hoc and usually involves a business analyst in the business department trying to reach the data center staff in the data center department via telephones. Often, the response is not received in a timely manner, and the business analyst is unable to execute the change that might have given the business a competitive edge.
One way to achieve the efficiency in communication is via automation. However, there are factors that prevent prompt and efficient implementation of business decisions in conventional systems, including: 1) a lack of information on the impact of the business decision on Information Technology (IT) resources and 2) a long turnaround time for IT operations to prepare and provision resources.
Another goal that successful enterprises aspire towards is being flexible enough to adapt to changing business conditions. Currently, flexibility may be at the IT level, at the business level, or both. Certain technology solutions (e.g., the High Performance On Demand (HiPODS) WebSphere® and DB2® Orchestration solution (also referred to as a WADO solution) available from International Business Machines Corporation) enable users to run multiple applications on a shared set of servers, and still meet their Service Level Agreements (SLAs), without human intervention. Briefly, in the WADO solution, applications are first prioritized. Under peak load conditions, servers in a spare pool are autonomically provisioned to process increased real-time traffic. Under normal load conditions, the servers in the spare pool do not sit idle, but process the workloads of the other lower priority applications that reside on the same set of servers. Adopting such technology solutions may result in efficient use of hardware resources. These technology solutions provide the foundation for an on demand operating environment, and flexibility is achieved at the IT level.
Current solutions do not provide flexibility at the business level. Flexibility at the business level may be described as the ability to make a business decision and respond to the IT ramifications of the business decision in a timely manner. For example, if, the owner of an online retail store decides to start a new promotion, the owner needs to ensure that there are enough servers in the data center to handle the increased traffic on the web site as a result of the promotion. This check would avoid overloading of the servers. An inadequate number of servers may increase response times and make the online store unresponsive, ultimately leading to loss of business. Current solutions available today do not address the flexibility needed for such a scenario. The appropriate infrastructure would allow owners to make their business decisions and let the IT department ensure sufficient capacity is available. If the IT department is not able to meet the new requirements, the infrastructure should allow the business owners to be promptly notified to take appropriate action.
Another example illustrates this idea of achieving flexibility at the business level. A business analyst of a toy retail store realizes by monitoring key sales performance indicators that sales for hardware game consoles are down. After further analysis, the business analyst also finds that the games, which have relatively higher profitable margins, are not selling well either. As an experienced person in the retail toy industry, the business analyst knows that by selling the game consoles at a discount, more customers will also end up buying games to play on the game consoles, thereby driving higher profits for the toy store. Now, putting the hardware game consoles on sale has two implications: 1) the sale may drive large volume of customers to the online web site and 2) stores need to be adequately stocked with enough inventory to satisfy the expected increased demand. Before the business analyst may decide to start a new promotion, the business analyst needs to ensure that both the implications are covered. This may mean getting go-ahead acknowledgements promptly from the inventory manager and the IT manager. With current solutions, this process is performed manually by the business analyst talking to the inventory manager and the IT manager.
An on demand operating environment implies flexibility in multiple aspects of a business. Being able to get the current status of inventory is very important for a retail business, more and more of which are using technologies, such as radio frequency identifications (RFIDs). In the toy store example, the business analyst was alerted that a particular store was running low in its inventory of hardware game consoles. Because the toy store business was using technologies, such as RFID technology, to monitor shipments, the business analyst could quickly determine that a shipment was due to leave the warehouse for another store that was not quite as low on inventory. This gave the business analyst the opportunity to divert the shipment of game consoles from the warehouse to the store that was low in its inventory. This was possible because the toy store company integrated and automated different aspects of their business departments. However, in current solutions, this is done manually by the business analyst.
Flexibility at the business level also includes the ability to handle change requests frequently, not just seasonally. Most businesses have adequate processes to handle seasonal changes. More and more, businesses need to react to daily requests. An online store that has the freedom to make daily decisions about what items to put on sale clearly has a competitive edge over those that can react only on a monthly or seasonal basis.
Today many businesses address the challenges of fluctuating IT demands by over provisioning and setting up dedicated silos. A silo may be described as a set of hardware assigned to one application. Silos may result in disparate grouping of hardware resources with very little overall utilization.
Thus, there is a need in the art for integrating performance, sizing, and provisioning techniques with a business process.